Drinking, but not necessarily heavy prolonged drinking, immediately proceeded all of Gabriel Wortman’s violent outbursts that have been exposed to date

Sometimes it was just social drinking, maybe a little heavy social drinking, at a party or a family dinner that turns our ever-joking, ever-smiling nice guy, like turning on a dime, into a potentially extremely violent aggressor.

If that suggests anything, it is that his rage lay just below the surface and was relatively easily revealed —- it should have set up bigger alarm bells than it obviously did.

I don’t drink and I don’t hang around people who do drink heavily.

But just once I was in a journalists’ bar and someone I thought a friend as well as a reporter turned on me when he was very drunk to the extend that I thought he might get dangerous violent.

He had a beef against me, probably a legitimate beef, in my role as a political and environmental  activist.

But he had never expressed it to me when sober, possibly not wanting to burn bridges to a source or something.

We have met many times since and he has always been his usual friendly open self. But I remain shaken to this day, 35 years later, to see the usually hidden depths beneath ordinary individuals.

Mine is a commonplace story - most of you can recall far more incidents than mine where someone’s personality changed greatly for the worse when they drank.

I guess the time we really should intervene until it helps is when violent talk becomes violent action - usually against family but it could be total strangers as well.

By intervene I mean we have to tell the police, and keep on telling the police, until they really feel it as human beings, that we have frequently observed this individual go from smiling jekyll to foaming hyde whenever he/she drinks  —- and now he has actually carried out this threat and we are willing to stand up in court to say so, because we think he might kill someone or many someones, some day....